A Day of Good Meetings
Started the day with a characteristically cathartic and constructive DSA meeting, followed by a lengthy lunchtime hiatus in honor of Tais’ last day at work. In the afternoon I met with Andy, going a long way towards resolving some of the issues and anxieties discussed with Beau in the morning. Some concrete outcomes of the meeting:
- As regards the morphospace, Andy thinks my approach of linking morphometric data to Neptune is “spectacular” (his words), and thus worth the effort, even if this means putting in a fair amount of work tracking down obscure descriptions of fossil genera.
- After hearing my complaints about the difficulties of the FIB work, Andy stated that he believed the morphospace, diversity/e-o, and radiolarian projects would make “three valuable chapters”, which I understood to mean ‘sufficient for a thesis’, and that I may decide at the end of the summer that the FIB project would be something I’d save for a post-doc.
- Andy was very engaged by my re-telling of Alroy’s SQ algorithm and continues to think that the E-O project will make an “interesting and important” thesis chapter.
Knowing that the FIB project is not a requirement for graduation immediately transformed my perception. Suddenly—without the pressure of feeling that I have to do it—the FIB project seems infinitely less depressing and daunting, and much more like a challenging adventure. It’s funny how the mind works. All in all, a great day of meetings… and that’s not something you hear often!
- previous:
- FIB Looks Worse, Again
- next:
- Wingaersheek
Beau
July 30, 2010 @ 6:30 pm
Ah, how the tables turn! At 9 am, the FIB-monster was devouring your soul, and by 5 pm, it is but a fluffy bunny frolicking in a meadow. Glad to see also that Andy was so positive on the morphospace stuff, but did he really address the time issue? I got the sense that digging around for hundreds of obscure historical papers would chew up an unreasonable amount of time. Was that incorrect? What’s your time estimate on how long it would take to do all that? This is not, of course, to discourage you, I’m just curious to know how this is all scheduling out – particularly since the FIB may no longer be an essential project.
kotrc
August 2, 2010 @ 10:08 am
Hey Beau—thanks much for the comment. Andy did address the time issue; I explained to him at length what the challenge was, and he asked a couple of clarifying questions (how many genera is it that you will need to dig up papers for, etc.). He acknowledged that this was going to be a lot of work, but his take was that it would be worthwhile to do, because of the pay-off of ending up with a dataset combining the occurrence-through-time information in Neptune with morphological information. I agreed to make a weeks’ worth of effort on gathering this elusive information to see how it would go, and then reassess the feasibility of doing it in light of better knowledge of how long it will actually take. He also suggested that, should we travel to Germany in the fall (as requested by the Germans, who after all are giving us all the money), we’d be able to consult their diatom taxonomic collection there (which is probably the best in the world) to fill in missing gaps.